PokerStars Preparing to Enter the Daily Fantasy Sports Market

Some interesting news came from the ODF Report earlier today. Chris Grove reports that Amaya, the parent company of PokerStars, is planning to enter the daily fantasy sports market. In an earnings call, Amaya CEO David Baazov stated PokerStars’ intention to offer real money fantasy sports this year.

It looks like PokerStars is planning to make the move fairly quickly – perhaps as soon as the beginning of the 2015 NFL season. Amaya’s CEO also revealed that PokerStars will do internal development as well as look for “strategic acquisitions.”

Amaya’s 2014 fourth quarter report put it this way:

“Going forward, Amaya intends to acquire new customers and gain online gaming market share through the continued expansion of the B2C business in other verticals, including sportsbetting, casino, social gaming and daily fantasy sports, which we expect will supplement our current growth plans for our core poker business. Amaya currently anticipates executing on this strategic direction through both organic development and strategic M&A [mergers and acquisitions].”

PokerStars could quickly become a major competitor given its brand name recognition, marketing prowess and experience in dealing with massive server loads. If PokerStars chooses to go full bore, we’ll be hearing about the new platform very soon.

Crossover Going Both Ways

It isn’t exactly an industry secret that online poker and daily fantasy have a lot of crossovers. Your humble writer is a former poker player and I’d bet a good portion of our readers have also dabbled in poker. Some of today’s biggest DFS winners repeatedly make comparisons between daily fantasy and online poker.

So PokerStars announcing its intent to attack the fantasy market makes sense on its face. PokerStars already has a huge player base that is comfortable with wagering money at virtual poker tables. Plus, we’ve already seen the crossover from online poker to online fantasy here in the United States. PokerStars is as primed as anyone to get off to a quick start in real money daily fantasy sports.

This is just speculation on my part, but PokerStars may also be eying crossover in the other direction – from DFS to online poker. PokerStars could conceivably build a customer base here in the US in anticipation of introducing that base to online poker in the future. I see it going like this: they build a successful fantasy platform in the US and then introduce that user base to poker when the laws change and PokerStars returns to the US poker market.

Speaking of which, David Baazov also said that PokerStars expects to receive its New Jersey online poker license within the next quarter and is actively lobbying for online poker in Pennsylvania and California. PokerStars is just too big for them not to show up in the US sooner or later.

It will also be interesting to see how hard PokerStars tries to sell ROTW (rest of the world) players on daily fantasy. Will we one day find ourselves playing in NFL and soccer leagues against people from the UK, Europe and elsewhere?

I don’t know about you, but my mouth waters at the thought of joining a heads-up NFL match and noticing that my opponent hails from the Czech Republic.